


The musician

by breathedout



Category: Original Work
Genre: Divorce, Memory, Pastiche, Unreliable memory, with apologies to Lydia Davis
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-14
Updated: 2013-05-14
Packaged: 2017-12-11 18:52:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,789
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/802014
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/breathedout/pseuds/breathedout
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The day I finally decided to end my marriage, there was a death in the news.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The musician

**Author's Note:**

> I'm posting this as an original work, but it's actually at least as derivative as anything I've put on AO3. It owes its existence to the great Lydia Davis, whose style I am cribbing shamelessly in an effort to get her out of my system. We'll see if I'm successful. If anyone likes this and hasn't read her, let me tell you: you are in for a treat. Hie thee to a bookstore or library on the double.
> 
> Huge thanks as always to [greywash](http://archiveofourown.org/users/greywash/pseuds/greywash) for joining in and guiding my obsessive revisions of pretty much every single phrase in this story. Especially that one fucking sentence. You know the one. Thanks for that.

The day I finally decided to end my marriage, there was a death in the news. I heard about it on the car radio that morning, before I had decided definitely one way or the other. Then, much later in the day, I saw an online newspaper story while I was looking for something else.

The person who died was a musician. He (I am almost sure the musician was a man) had been influential in his field. The reporters on the radio and in the online newspaper talked about the current state of popular music, citing examples their audience would understand, and then compared that to how things were before the musician came along. Their arguments were convincing. While I had already known the man’s name, and could probably identify his major works, I had been unaware of the breadth of his legacy. Learning about everything he had done, I had a sudden desire, unusual for me, to see him in concert. This was ironic, of course. I would never be able to see him, having only learned of his importance as a result of his death.

In the online piece there were interviews with other famous musicians. People the man had worked with over the years, and other people who claimed to have been influenced by him—by his records, or his performance style, or even by something else entirely: say, charity work he had done, or a political cause he had taken up. People in both groups, in discussing the man’s death, used the phrase “the end of an era.” I remember thinking that I would always remember the day this musician died, because, having decided to get divorced, I was at the end of an era as well.

As it turns out, I remember neither the exact day of my decision, nor the name of the musician who died.

I wonder if this is because of the way I organized my mind. Having entrusted each memory to the other, I left them both alone. I had other things to think about, after all, especially during that first spring after the divorce. I thought that if I needed either memory, I could always consult its twin. Indeed, even now, if I still recalled the location of one, it would be simple to find the other. As it is, all I remember is the story.

No doubt I could sort out the whole business logically, starting with the facts and reasoning backwards from what I know for sure. I remember, for one thing, that all this happened during the holiday season. All autumn I had been going through my life at a remove. It was as if I were a character in a story. When I would find myself in a shop decorated for Christmas or Chanukah, I would remember that this character’s story happened to be set during the holidays. I would admire the convincing setting: the tinsel, the toy displays, the harried crowds. Yes, I would think: that is what the holidays look like. I can imagine just what this character must be feeling, walking as she is in a crowded shopping mall, at night, some weeks before Christmas.

Oddly, the feeling of disconnection allowed me to enjoy the holiday season more than I usually do—at least, during those moments when I could put aside the state of my marriage. My character shared my dislike of pushy shoppers and awkward office parties, but her distress could be appreciated aesthetically, in the comfortable way one might appreciate a well-made film about one fraught December in the life of a young woman. From a storytelling perspective, the holiday setting was an effective choice. I could relate to the character since many people, myself included, also experience the holidays as stressful. My appreciation for this narrative effect even led me to seek out what I caught myself thinking of as "other" books and films set during the holidays. By “other,” I meant “other than the one I am living in,” which was of course not actually a book or a film at all.

I also wrote a story around that time which was set at Christmas. In the story my main character was newly divorced, and felt disconnected from those around her. I was unclear whether this story was influenced more by my own situation, or by all the other Christmas stories I had been seeking out, at least one of which also involved divorce.

Even when I was faced with the kinds of holiday tasks that usually distress me—for example, selecting a present for my husband’s young nephew, whom I knew hardly at all—my character’s unhappiness was more appealing, more picturesque than my own would have been. There she sat, with her notebook in a café, her pen uncapped, trying to make a list of gift ideas. She had ordered a cup of tea, but had not yet written anything. She pushed her hair out of her eyes. Oh, I thought: she is the kind of girl who goes to cafés to drink tea and make lists.

Perhaps she would presently begin to write. She would nod to herself, underlining certain things and crossing others out. As she reached the end of her cup of tea she would circle something, emphatically, and check the time on her phone as she paid her bill. If that happened, I would conclude that she was an efficient and businesslike girl, the kind who goes to cafés to make lists because the tea and the bustle stimulate her thinking.

But perhaps she would continue to sit as she was doing. She would gaze out the café window, flicking the cap of her pen against her notebook page while her tea cooled. Some time later she would come out of her reverie. She would glance down at her blank paper, and rub at her eyes. If that happened, I would assume that she was a distractible girl, prone to dreaming. The kind who goes to cafés to make lists because she wants to escape, or to procrastinate, or because she likes the cafés and hopes the lists will write themselves.

In either case I would know something new, and be satisfied.

Even if the girl in the café allowed the question of her nephew’s gift to lapse completely, failing to buy him anything, so that either her husband would have to rush out, resentful, at the last minute, to find something himself; or Christmas morning would arrive and the nephew would notice the absence of a gift from his distant aunt and uncle, doubtless drawing his own conclusions unknown to either of them—even from this chain of events, I would glean new information. So that I felt no investment at all in the outcome of my character’s present dilemma; only a mild desire to get to know her, this girl sitting in the café with her steaming cup of tea, surrounded by holiday shoppers.

All of which is to say that if I remember anything clearly about that period just before my divorce, it is the impression of the holidays. And after all, only so many highly influential musicians can have died in a given year between Halloween and New Year’s Eve. No doubt there are lists of them on the internet.

In fact, I do sometimes think of a musician who strikes me as a likely candidate. Sometimes, if I remember long enough, I look him up online. In the interval between the time when I first think of his name and the time when I load his internet biography—sometimes very short, as when I am already writing at my computer; and other times quite long, as when I am sitting in a work meeting, unable to check my phone—I catch a glimpse of the world as it will be, if this musician I'm thinking of is the one who died that day.

The picture doesn't change very much, of course. Regardless of who he was he is still dead, and I am still divorced. Nevertheless. When I try out, mentally, various musicians in his empty spot, I find that there are subtle differences in the look of what I left behind.

One afternoon, I thought he might have been a particular pianist: a man beloved of my elderly childhood piano teacher, and one who seemed to me to belong to another era. This pianist had, in the 1960s, delivered definitive performances of pieces by nineteenth-century Russian composers; though his style had later come to be considered fussy, and sentimental, and he had fallen out of favor. Imagining that he had been the one to die that day, I thought about how my ex-husband, too, was more sentimental than I. By comparison I had often seemed cold; and despite my frequent guilt about this coldness, I could never bring myself to change.

Another morning it struck me that the musician might be a certain composer: one whose work was known for being challenging, avant-garde. He was the kind of composer who inspires audience members to storm out of theaters; and later, over bottles of wine, to argue with one another about the definition of music. I remembered that my ex-husband and I, before we were married, had attended a performance: a collaboration between a well-known abstract painter, a famous modernist choreographer, and this composer of whom I was thinking. My ex-husband had liked the choreographer's work, whereas I was enthusiastic about the painter. We were both pleased by the symmetry of introducing the other to a favorite artist. Even as I recalled these events, I remembered that my ex-husband had eventually improved at taking part in the kind of debates the composer inspired; though at the time of this performance they had still made him horribly uncomfortable.

There were other names that occurred to me for the role of the musician, though I’ve since forgotten them. It is possible, now that I think about it, that some of them were female. True, I seem to recall a male musician; but I could easily be mistaken. It is even possible that the deceased person was not a musician at all; that she was instead a photographer, or a fashion designer, or even an architect.

As it turned out, the avant-garde composer had died decades before; while the pianist, who had seemed to me so much older than the composer, did not die until the spring following my divorce. It appears that the person I have come to think of as _my_ musician was someone else: someone whose name has not yet occurred to me, and whom I prefer, for the time being, not to seek out.


End file.
